Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Of all the relationships on Buffy, Willow and Tara’s feels the most separated from the goings-on of the other Scoobies. That separation is partly forced because their relationship is a lesbian one and thus not quite socially acceptable, especially on network television. Willow and Tara are much less physically affectionate in comparison to the show’s other significant relationships, and at the beginning of their relationship their intimacy has to be portrayed through metaphor. In the context of the show, Willow does not openly date Tara at first because she is coming out to herself and worries about her friends’ reactions. But Willow and Tara also remain conscious of and even maintain a separate space for their relationship to occupy. Because of the "behind closed doors" nature of their relationship, a close look at door imagery, of which there is quite a bit, is warranted and indeed rewarded. Doors, doorways, and entryways help to illustrate the progression of Willow and Tara’s relationship and its integration into the "mainstream" of the show.

Of course, each character opens a door at some point, and theoretically everyone has to go through doors all the time to get from room to room and place to place. But doors are interesting. Doors are obviously associated with entry and exit, but often those entrances and exits relate to more than just the physical space. The ideas, people, and values that space represents are being embraced or dismissed as well. Who can open particular doors or pass through doorways into certain spaces indicates ownership, privilege, and power. Doors also provide isolation or privacy, and in the Buffyverse doors and doorways can effectively protect against vampires who cannot cross some thresholds without an invitation.

Doorways and entryways are also liminal spaces or places of transition. Obviously, people go from outside to inside or from one space to another through doorways, but entryways differ somewhat. They are part of a space but at the same time disconnected and, in fact, almost purgatorial: one only lingers in an entryway until accepted into the rest of the building where meaningful interactions take place. Liminal spaces often play a significant role in portraying queer relationships. Because same-sex relationships have been considered socially deviant, they oftentimes can only safely exist in liminal spaces, like a darkened alley or a bathroom stall. But restricting queer characters to liminal spaces ensures that their "threatening" sexuality does not come in contact with "moral," heterosexual spaces like marriage, the home, and the nuclear family. The confinement also implies that they do not or cannot belong in those places.

Images of doors, entryways, and doorways feature prominently throughout Willow and Tara’s relationship, but Tara in particular has a lot of such imagery associated with her starting from her first appearance in "Hush." Indeed, Tara choosing to delve into the Scoobies’ world of vampires, demons, and monsters is marked by a door. As Tara leaves her dorm room to find Willow so that they can do a spell together, she opens the door and looks back hesitantly at her room before shutting the door behind her. She has a definite moment of exiting one world and entering another. Because Tara is an outsider to the group, her space exists outside of the Scoobies’ domain. And unlike Giles and Xander’s apartments or Spike’s crypt, Tara’s room never becomes a place where the Scoobies hang out or even a place they visit sometimes. Because of that separation, Tara’s room becomes a place where Willow may explore her sexuality and transition to a gay identity. Or perhaps that relationship is actually inverse: because Tara is queer she must inhabit separate space, which makes her an outsider. Because doors are such an important part of demarcating space, the majority of door imagery related to Tara reveals the limitations of how she may and what space she may occupy as a queer outsider.

Tara’s role for much of season four is allowing Willow access to her room – access to queer space – quite literally opening her door so that their relationship may foster. Tara first opens her door to Willow in “The I in Team” when she drops by to ask if Tara wants to hang out after Buffy blows her off to patrol with Riley. Willow had been in Tara’s room before to do magic together in "A New Man," but that scene begins with Willow already inside the room. Thus, this little moment of Willow asking if she can enter Tara’s room seems more significant than her simply inquiring if Tara wants to "do something." Their body language also suggests something more: Willow is visibly nervous and hopeful, and Tara’s smile is on the warmer side of friendly as she lets Willow into her room. Combined with the door closing, leaving the audience outside the room, I’m inclined to believe that this episode marks when Willow and Tara’s relationship becomes more than just a friendship. This scene perhaps represents Willow’s coming out to herself, choosing to enter Tara’s room in a more significant way than before.

The following episode “Goodbye Iowa” contains a similar scene in which a very smiley Willow comes to Tara’s room for help with a spell. They talk about the "spells" they did after the door closed in "The I in Team," and Tara says that she has been thinking about "that last spell [they] did all day," which overtly hints at the romantic nature of Willow and Tara’s relationship for the first time. If "The I in Team" represents their first actually sexual (and not just magical) encounter, then "Goodbye Iowa" is their processing of that event. While Willow seems excited by their newly forming relationship, she has yet to fully embrace it because she still needs to knock and be let into Tara’s room.

"New Moon Rising" obviously marks an important turning point for Willow and Tara when Willow doubly asserts her queer identity by choosing Tara over Oz and revealing to Buffy that she has been romantically involved with a woman. The first time Willow comes to Tara’s room during the episode, Tara opens her door and invites Willow inside. When Willow visits a second time to tell Tara that she has chosen to be with her and not Oz, she steps into the room without a clear invitation. After making that choice and thereby establishing her queer identity, Willow has freer access to Tara’s (queer) space and no longer has to pause in the liminal space of the doorway. Indeed, the next time Willow enters Tara’s room in “Family” she opens the door without knocking.

While she must open doors to queer spaces for Willow, Tara must be escorted out of liminal spaces and into familiar ones as her and Willow’s implied lesbian relationship becomes more explicit. Of course, Willow has to introduce Tara to her friends and their personal spaces, but Tara seemingly doesn’t have the agency to enter even public Scooby spaces by herself. When Willow takes Tara to The Bronze in "Who Are You?" Tara had never been to the club before, which implies that she couldn’t go there unaccompanied by Willow. Similarly, in “Family” Willow thinks that she hears Tara outside the Magic Box and opens the front door, suggesting that Tara could not have opened the door herself. In "The Real Me,” Tara even has to leave a space that had been familiar to her when the Scoobies begin to occupy it in a meaningful way. Tara says she comes to the Magic Box a lot, and only she knew the dead shopkeeper’s name. But as Willow and Buffy investigate the murder scene and Giles begins to contemplate buying the store, Tara leaves the shop and joins Dawn outside, saying that it’s "Best non-Scoobies like [them] stay out of the way." [Amber Benson & Alyson Hannigan in ’’Buffy vs. Dracula’’] In "Family," Tara finally enters a Scooby space by herself and, not coincidentally, finally feels embraced as part of the group in a way that she hadn’t before. As the Scoobies help Buffy move out of her dorm room, Tara makes a joke that no one understands and then walks out the door, which emphasizes her feeling like an outsider despite very obviously wanting to be part of the group. Later in the episode when she walks into the Magic Box with Willow and sees her brother, she fears that his presence might jeopardize her ability to occupy that space, because her family could reveal her misguided belief that she is a demon. Even her personal space becomes compromised when she walks into her dorm room and finds her father inspecting her belongings. Feeling potentially excluded from the group, and indeed even from Sunnydale, Tara is pushed to liminal spaces and must perform her demon-hiding spell from a doorway in the magic shop. While that spell endangers the Scoobies by blinding them to demons, it also creates an opportunity for Tara to help them without any assistance from Willow. And Tara enters a Scooby space by herself for the first time when she walks into the Magic Box and warns Buffy about the Lei-Ach demon about to attack her.

Tara’s incorporation into the Scoobies becomes conflated with the group’s acceptance of Willow’s new queer identity and their relationship. When Willow and Tara visit Giles’ apartment in "Primeval” the morning after Willow outs their relationship, Giles must open his front door for them. Where they could barge into Giles’ apartment in “Who Are You?” as an anonymous couple, after their relationship has been revealed they no longer have that power and privilege. As the Scoobies’ create a place in the gang for Tara during the course of “Family,” they also must resolve their lingering uncertainty about Willow and Tara’s relationship. Toward the beginning of the episode, Buffy and Xander are quick to say “it’s cool” that Willow is now “Swingin’ with the [’lesbian’] lifestyle,” but they also express a sense of alienation, worrying that they won’t fit in at Tara’s birthday party. And while they think Tara is "nice," “real nice,” “super nice,” they say that they “don’t necessarily get her” because they don’t understand “Half of what she says.” All they really seem to know about Tara is that she likes Willow, that she is a lesbian, which seemingly hinders their ability to communicate with her. By accepting Tara they also accept her sexuality and relationship with Willow, even though they may not understand it. Willow and Tara dancing together at The Bronze at the end of the episode, their first public display of couplehood, underscores that their relationship has also been newly acknowledged.

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